Attention Battlestar Galactica Android OS fans, Samsung has just taken the wraps off its newest Android-powered smartphone, the Galaxy Spica. By the sound of that name, it appears the Cylons have taken control of Samsung’s mobile division.
The newest soldier in the ever-growing ‘droid army features a 800MHz processor (just like its Moment sibling) and is the first Android smartphone to include native DivX support (so you won’t have to convert your downloaded collection of BSG to watch on the go!). Along with the improved codec support, the Galaxy Spica (GS) also touts other improved multimedia-centric features like the inclusion of DNSe 2.0 for “better sound quality” and 3.5 mm jack for use with your favorite headphones.
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As Sesame Street is currently celebrating its 40th anniversary now seems like as good a time as any for us to practice our counting…of mobile operating systems/platforms. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Darn, my hand ran out of fingers! Well, no matter, Samsung thinks there is plenty of room for more and has taken the wraps off its own, new open mobile platform, bada.
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You’re looking at the latest fashion phone that’s sure to find its way into celebrities’ gift bags at the end of fancy yacht parties. It’s the product of a collaboration between Armani, Samsung and Microsoft. That’s right: a €700 phone that runs WinMo 6.5. Oh, dear.
![Screen shot 2009-10-06 at [ October 6 ] 11.53.59 AM](http://www.mobilecrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Screen-shot-2009-10-06-at-October-6-11.53.59-AM-173x300.png "Screen shot 2009-10-06 at [ October 6 ] 11.53.59 AM")
And Windows Mobile 6.5 Day keeps on rollin’! Further proving that the mobile phone industry is complete out of names to use, Sprint and Samsung have just announced a device they’ve decided to dub the “Intrepid”.
While we wouldn’t have guessed it at first glance, that 2.5″ screen is actually a touchscreen. They’ve got a full QWERTY keyboard down below that, with a 3.2 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, and microSD slot tucked inside.
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And here I thought the megapixel race was over! Guess not, what with Samsung showing off, for the very first time, the SCH-W880, the world’s first cellphone with a 12-megapixel camera. Because how many times have you said to yourself, “Man, I want to take a photo of this unusual drink, but only have the iPhone’s rubbish camera”?
Sprint may not be the number one mobile carrier, but it sure does seem to be picking up the slack in the handset department recently. The Now Network is expected to get yet another new mobile in the form of the Samsung Instinct HD.
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Mobile phone manufacturers are usually not the most generous when it comes to providing OS updates for older smartphones. That fact didn’t stop a curious Samsung Omnia i900 owner in the Netherlands from contacting his local Samsung branch about the upcoming release of WinMo 6.5.
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Take a look over at that phone to the right. Can you name it? Yes, yes – it’s obviously a Samsung. But can you name the model? We haven’t covered this phone much here at MobileCrunch; no mobile blog outside of the Samsung-specific blogs have, really. But that hasn’t kept it from being a raging success.
Samsung announced this morning that this phone – which, by the way, is the ….
Damn it, Samsung. Really? You’re carrying on with this “Messager” non-sense? Yeah, yeah, it’s a perfectly valid (if obsolete) synonym for “Messenger”, but so is “crier”. You probably wouldn’t call a phone the Samsung Crier, would you?
Oh well; names aside, MetroPCS’ new Messsenger .. Massager .. Messager’s toting a slide out QWERTY keyboard, EV-DO, and a 2 mp camera. The phone will set you back $149 – but considering it’s on MetroPCS and is thus contract-free, that’s not too bad at all.
While we’re not exactly impressed with the overall look of Samsung’s upcoming budget-friendly touchscreen, the S3650 Corby, that doesn’t keep us from getting excited when it gets caught behind a camera lens. The design of the battery cover is ever-so-slightly different than the one we saw before, implying that this may be a prototype.
Final hardware or not, it brings a friend.
What’s black, yellow, red, and just a wee bit ugly all over? If you guessed the Samsung S3650 Corby, good job! We also would have accepted “Clint Howard wearing a bumblebee suit and a red fedora.”
The Corby, pictured here, rides that fine line between “Budget featurephone” and “Phone you’ll still like 6 months from now” quite well. Its got quad-band GSM, a 2.8″ QVGA touchscreen, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, a 2MP camera, and FM radio. Alas, it’s all packed behind Samsung’s proprietary OS running TouchWiz to the core, so what you see up front is pretty much what you get – at least until Samsung launches TouchWiz widget downloads, that is. Rumors pin this thing at around $200 sans contract, though no price has been officially confirmed.
[AreaMobile via SamsungHub]
Well, that’s a nice change of pace. We generally have to turn to UK handset retailers to spill the beans on new phones ahead of schedule; this time around, it’s Best Buy with the loose lips.
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All of the signs (that is, all of the leaks) told us to expect the T-Mobile Gravity 2 to launch on August 19th. We’re just a few hours into August 19th, and sure enough: we just got word that the Gravity 2 is now available.
Coming in at $29.99 (after a $50 mail in rebate and a 2 year contract) and being pitched as an “affordable messaging phone”, don’t expect much more beyond the basics. On the upside, it does come in “berry mauve” and “metallic pumpkin”, the latter of which would make a totally bitchin’ band name.
Check out the full release after the jump.
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If the “S” in “iPhone 3G S” stands for speed, we’re going to wager that the “Q” in “Instinct Q” stands for QWERTY. And if it doesn’t? We don’t really care, because BAM! QWERTY KEYBOARD!
After the release of the touch-only myTouch and Hero, we were starting to wonder when we’d see another Android handset with a QWERTY keyboard beyond the G1 – and here it is in all of its glory by way of Phandroid. The Sprint logos adorning the face should come as no surprise; it is an Instinct, after all.
We can’t wait to use that keyboard. Helio Ocean-esque keys complete with a full number row? Yes, please.
We’ll probably have some more details on this later today, but we’re able to spill some of it now seeing as much of it just went live on Samsung’s own site
If you haven’t been keeping up with all the latest in Samsung news, here’s what you need to know: Samsung’s got a widget interface called TouchWiz, which they’ve been rolling out across their touchscreen phones since around June of last year. You’ve got a drawer containing some widgets, and four flickable pages to toss these widgets onto. So far, they’ve got TouchWiz up and running on Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Samsung’s own proprietary OS. TouchWiz looks and behaves more or less identically on all of these platforms, providing some degree of uniform user experience across vastly different interfaces.
We haven’t been huge fans of TouchWiz thus far, largely because of its lack of expandability. Each TouchWiz-enabled device came with 10-15 widgets, and that was that. If you wanted to download more, you were out of luck. If you wanted to make your own, that was just too bad. That’s all about to change.
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Earlier today, AT&T announced the touch-screen Solstice from Samsung. Equipped with a 3-inch touch-screen, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, a 2-megapixel camera and little else, the Solstice is an entry-level touch-screen device. But, the one really cool thing about the Solstice is that it comes with TouchWiz 2.0. The second gen UI from Samsung features live widgets, which makes it infinitely better than previous TouchWiz devices. Grab one for th tween or yourself on August 2 for $100.
Alright, so Samsung wasn’t exactly the first kid on the block to break the mobile gigahertz barrier, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of effort. It looks like they’re ready to put that behind them, as they and partner Intrinsity have unveiled their first foray into the realm of high performance mobility: the 1 GHz Hummingbird processor.
The Hummingbird itself is based on ARM’s Cortex A8 processor, but what sets it self apart from other A8 processors are modifcations Samsung and Intrinsity’s crew have made to the Cortex arcitecture that allow it to run at such a high clock speed even at low voltage. According to Samsung, the Hummingbird also sports “32KB each of data and instruction caches, an L2 cache, the size of which can be customized, and an ARM® NEON™ multi-media extension.” Read More
Perhaps it’s the die-hard QWERTY keyboard purist in me, but I don’t see how these tiny touchscreen phones are viable options these days. Look at the size of the screen on the Samsung Highlight compared to that of the iPhone and G1. (I am not comparing this device to the iPhone or G1 in any way, shape or form other than the size of the screen.) It’s so freaking tiny. Regardless, we welcome the Highlight to the T-Mobile lineup today.
The 3G device packs a 3-megapixel camera (3x digital zoom, video), stereo Bluetooth, aGPS and a plethora of widgets in a teeny, tiny package with a 1.61- x 2.64-inch capacitive touchscreen. (Sidenote: I’ve been hammering Samsung for years about these wimpy resistive touchscreens that they seem to be in love with. They suck. Just sayin’.)
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Man, these leakers are cutting it close. The T559 Comeback is purportedly launching tomorrow, but it took up until yesterday for the information to really start pouring out – not that we’re complaining. Yesterday morning gave us product shots, but now we’ve got some specs to roll with.
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When it comes to “luxury” brand handsets, the original Samsung Armani is one of the less ridiculous choices you could make. It is, in every sense, the exact opposite of the Dior phone. It has actual features that people might want, isn’t mindblowingly ugly, and doesn’t cost 5-friggin’-thousand dollars. We’re not sure how well the original Armani sold, but it seems to have done well enough to warrant a sequel.
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